Anat Hoffman After Arrest: A Minority Controls Israel's Holy Sites and Abuses Its Power

The chairwoman of Women of the Wall was detained at the Western Wall this week for the sixth time in two decades; Hoffman: They checked me naked, dragged me on the floor 15 meters; my arms are bruised.

Anat Hoffman was arrested at the Western Wall on Tuesday night for saying the Sh’ma Israel, Judaism’s central proclamation of faith, out loud at Israel’s holiest site.

“I was saying Sh’ma Israel and arrested for it. It’s just unbelievable,” she said in an interview from her bathtub, where she was soaking limbs bruised from being dragged by handcuffs across the police station floor and legs shackled as if she were a violent criminal. “It was awful.”

Hoffman has been detained by police at the Western Wall six times in the more than two decades that she has led Women of the Wall, a group which conducts prayer services in the women’s section at the start of each Jewish month. But on Tuesday night, when she was arrested for the crime of wearing a tallit and praying out loud, she was treated far more violently by police than ever before.

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